DARPA Wants a 19" Super-Efficient Supercomputer 200
coondoggie writes "If you can squish all the processing power of, say, an IBM Roadrunner supercomputer inside a 19-inch box and make it run on about 60 kilowatts of electricity,
the government wants to talk to you. The extreme scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency this week issued a call for research that might develop a super-small, super-efficient super beast of a computer. Specifically, DARPA's desires for Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC) will require a new system-wide technology approach including hardware and software co-design to minimize energy dissipation per operation and maximize energy efficiency, with a 50GFLOPS per watt goal."
Re:Yeah sure (Score:3, Informative)
19 inch box?
The IBM Roadrunner:
"occupies approximately 6,000 square feet..."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Roadrunner [wikipedia.org]
Good luck with that...
Could at least editors have a look at TFA? (Score:5, Informative)
It's a 19" _rack_, not _box_. As in, the standard (non-telco) datacenter rack size, accomodating up to 42U, 19" wide.
Re:Could at least editors have a look at TFA? (Score:3, Informative)
How tall does this rack have to be? :-) ) so this makes the standard rack able to contain a little over 6 feet worth of hardware, or 185ish cm. Of course the rack itself is usually a bit taller since it has a base and some fans on top (let me stress: usually).
Typically 42 Rack Units, as I said in the original post. A rack unit is 1.75" (and we use them even here in Europe so at least servers fit in racks, fortunately
Re:Will fit inside your Car Analogy (Score:3, Informative)
But where, exactly, would the batteries that can push 60 kilowatts go? I don't think they would fit in the trunk of a Mazda Miata with this magical imaginary computer.
Or more importantly, batteries that can push 60 kW for any period of time. I think that with enough cells, which you can make about as small as you want, you might get the power, but you definitely won't have the energy to run it for anytime whatsoever. The energy density is nowhere near good enough. But, Sticking with the Miata example, there's easily enough power under the hood to drive both the car and the computer, particularly with a high output option like the BPT [wikipedia.org]. You just need a generator, like the 53 kW version in the Volt [gm-volt.com]. For an automotive sized and powered vehicle, using year 2000 level power and materials technology, you could easily add such a computer and all it's benefits. That means effective, mobile, car sized autonomous fighting vehicles (since this is a DARPA project, I'm considering the military applications first) are extremely easy if you have this kind of computer, and motorcycle/Terminator sized units are probably possible, just using gas burning engines -- no advanced technology except the computer.
I apologize that wasn't clear from the original post.
--sabre86
Re:Heat (Score:3, Informative)
By my calculations 1 m^3/sec of air can carry away 65kW at a 50 degK temperature rise. That's doable, though you don't want it exhausting into your office.
Re:Simpler solution. (Score:3, Informative)
Redefine a Gigaflop. Say 1 billion floating point instructions per century.
Gigaflop doesn't even have a time dimension.
Re:Simpler solution. (Score:5, Informative)
Are you on drugs? Sure it does: FLoating point Operations Per Second.
Hint - they're looking for a machine that can do 50 gigaFLOPs. Such performance is always measured per unit of time. Same as 1 horsepower is 550 foot-pounds per second.
If you google for it yourself, you can keep your beginners-level trainee deck swab geek card :-)
Re:Simpler solution. (Score:4, Informative)
That's right -- gigaflops has a time dimension.
Gigaflop, on the other hand, doesn't. One gigaflop is a billion floating-point operations. One gigaflops is a billion floating-point operations per second. Contrary to "obvious" rules of grammar, the "s" isn't pluaralization, it's the unit "seconds".
It's doable, but too expensive (Score:5, Informative)
This is actually probably quite doable, but would be filthy expensive.
Most people don't realize, but digital electronics is way, WAY ahead of what you get in your home PC, if you're willing to pony up the cash.
For example, non-Silicon based semiconductors often outperform the good old standard stuff significantly. Silicon is by no means the fastest, it's just the cheapest. Gallium Arsenide and Indium-based materials can both clock many gigahertz higher than Silicion for the same process size and power dissipation. They're toxic, fragile, and the largest wafer sizes are tiny, so not exactly mainstream, but available now.
The real performance king though is the Rapid Single Flux Quantum [wikipedia.org] process, which can go over 100 GHz easily. It's used in things like radio telescope amplifiers and high-performance DSPs for military radar. Sure, it requires liquid helium cooling, but it also only requires milliwatts per gigaflop, so it's just about the only technology that'll let you squeeze a petaflop into a box and not have it melt into slag. That still means you'd need something like a kilowatt of cryogenic cooling, which is nontrivial, but still, I'd say it's doable with a bit of engineering wizardry.
Re:Simpler solution. (Score:3, Informative)
Supercomputer performance is always measured in FLOPs per second.
Sorry, as a guy who has built supercomputers (not the piddly CoW type either) and now consults on them on a daily basis, I can tell you that's not true. Common, but not an "always" worthy of bolding - dhrystones and whetstones and their modern versions in SPECint, SPECfp and their _scale counterparts and mcalpin's STREAM benchmark which reports bytes/s in addition to flops. Not every FLOP is created equal which is why more sophisticated measurements exist.
In fact, it is precisely because of my experience that I recognized your error of using "gigaflop" in the first place and made fun of you for doing so, its an extremely common error. One that anyone who does work in the high performance computing arena would recognize off the bat.
While you don't need a humor transplant, you do need an augmentation.